How an heiress survived being kidnapped and buried alive for 3 days

It’s most people’s worst nightmare: being buried alive and left for dead. On December 17, 1968, this nightmare came true for Barbara Jane Mackle, a 20-year-old student and heiress to a family real estate company in Florida.

Against all odds, the Emory University student survived her kidnapping and returned home with her family before Christmas arrived eight days later. Meanwhile, her captors – an escaped ex-convict and marine biology graduate – narrowly escaped the crime and a $500,000 ransom paid by Barbara’s father, Robert Mackle.

Over 50 years later Time he first detailed the frantic FBI search that uncovered the “tomb” in which Barbara was trapped in rural Georgia. PEOPLE recall the shocking kidnapping and search for a missing heiress.

Kidnapping

A week before Christmas, Barbara felt unwell during class and called her mother to pick her up early for the upcoming university summer break, Time reported. According to accounts, Barbara and her mother, Jane Mackle, had booked a room at a nearby motel where they planned to stay before returning home. Coastal Breeze News. But a knock on the door at four in the morning changed everything.

There were two people standing behind the door, one of whom introduced himself as a detective. They said they were there because Barbara’s boyfriend, Stewart Woodward, had been in a car accident. According to Coastal Breeze Newswhen Jane opened the door, a masked man with a shotgun and a smaller woman wearing a ski mask burst in, knocked her out with chloroform, and then tied her up by her hands and feet. Meanwhile, her daughter Barbara was kidnapped by strangers and put into their car.

Jane managed to free herself and called the police shortly thereafter, but by then Barbara was already being transported 30 miles north of Atlanta by her captors: escaped convict Gary Steven Krist and his accomplice Ruth Eisemann-Schier.

They were taking Barbara to bury her alive.

High ransom

In an interview with UPI 20 years after the kidnapping, Krist’s former parole officer, Tommy Morris, suggested that a prison escapee kidnap Barbara and bury her alive not for the $500,000 ransom he and Eisemann-Schier demanded from the Mackle family, but for the challenge of supporting the victim alive underground.

Nevertheless, Krist and Eisemann-Schier demanded half a million dollars from Mackle’s family, who were the heads of Deltona Corp., a Florida-based real estate development company that was reportedly worth $65 million at the time of Barbara’s kidnapping in 1968.

In a remote area of ​​Gwinnett County, Georgia, her captors placed Barbara in a “coffin-like box” with two flexible air tubes, an ration of food, water and sedatives, and other items necessary for survival. According to them, Krist and Eisemann-Schier buried the heiress one and a half feet underground Timewhere she stayed for three and a half days until an FBI search team found her.

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“He was looking for a wealthy woman with a tough mind,” Morris told UPI. “Someone who could withstand the trauma of being buried alive. Barbara Jane Mackle fits this profile.

Barbara remained thick-skinned, as she described in her 1971 book: 83 hours until dawn. “I was screaming and screaming,” Barbara recalled, according to UPI i ABC News. “The sounds of the earth were becoming more and more distant. Finally, I heard nothing above. Then I screamed for a long time.”

The 20-year-old is said to have replayed visions of the upcoming Christmas morning with her family to remain focused on survival.

Barbara’s rescue

Barbara’s whereabouts were discovered after Krist and Eisemann-Schief successfully received a $500,000 ransom from Barbara’s family and called the FBI, giving them the approximate coordinates of where they could find her.

Using clues from the initial botched ransom transfer, when Krist and Eisemann-Schief fled the scene and abandoned the car, police discovered the alias Krist was using, “George D. Deacon,” and began to put the pieces together, according to Time.

According to UPI, Krist was captured on the Florida coast in a speedboat he bought with some of the ransom money, and Eisemann-Schief was arrested months later after she submitted her fingerprints for a background check at an Oklahoma hospital where she applied for a job, according to UPI KOCO, ABC news affiliate.

According to UPI, Eisemann-Schief was deported back to Honduras, where she is from, while Krist was sentenced to life in prison. But 10 years later, Krist was released on parole, and decades later, he found a job as a licensed primary care physician in Indiana. ABC News.

The Mackle family maintained that Barbara remained relatively unfazed by the ordeal, although she rarely appeared in public in the following decades, according to UPI. Barbara later married and became a mother while living in Atlanta.